The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  A call. Well, of course, it’s Lelka. Women… And again he’s in the corridor talking with his palm covering his mouth: ‘Lelka, you, my child, are already testing my patience because right now I really don’t care about that nail you are polishing for her, got me? I am with a client now. The same one. We’re not drinking because this is a special case. Dangerous? He’s most dangerous to himself. Or maybe to you, stupid, if you keep asking… If you’ve already finished one of her hands, then take the other, am I, Goddamit, supposed to tell you when and whose nails to cut?!’

  Kolya has been talking in a raised voice. He returns furious. He is becoming a real man who has set things straight. Those women… But I see that he’s even looking at me all cockeyed, raw – like that Siamese cat. Because when somebody steps on Kolya Afanasyevich’s calluses and he gets worked up, he really gets worked up – like a week ago with that house with the pool outside the city where he, Mecikas, Nazaras and some others were putting in additional hours – not working for Totally Windows – fixing plumbing, digging trenches, putting in windows, plastering and painting. Having finished work and taken a shower – Nazaras even shaved, having carelessly singed his moustache while welding pipes, reducing him almost to tears because for him his moustache was everything and because ‘a real man should be able to have an eagle perch on his moustache’ – they joined the owner to ‘break the ice’ with a little Smirnoff. The owner had already laid out a spread next to the pool; he put out some tinned sprats, onions and a little herring, everything served in a refined way.

  He even took care to provide toothpicks, but the hostess, taking her husband to the side, said: ‘Did they already finish work? Felix, make sure I don’t ever see their mugs around here again…’ Kolya squinted like his fiery cat, though his eyebrows and fur were a ripe chestnut colour: ‘Ah, you see, our intellectual friends, our little brothers,’ I hear all of his tension in his voice, ‘if it weren’t for us, the Dimas, Mecikases, Slavikases and Kolyas, you wouldn’t have any windows, any walls, any shitholes, and even, it seems, any of your goddamn heads…’

  …Sometimes it is only the very faintest of feelings that can communicate with you. For example, when, for whatever reason, the only thing that remains of you is a frame, the outlines in a colouring book titled Colour Yourself, because all the colours have gone elsewhere (perhaps, like everything these days, to where they are better paid) and the desire and strength to colour deserts you once again, there comes a gift of fate. Even if the sky drops red socks into the space between the lines, of course, it’s not enough – Nicholas Belochvostikov must be inside those socks. Having buried our small misunderstandings, Kolya and I spoke, naraspashku, and it seemed that there were no topics that could not be broached: fear as one of the basic states of man; the soul and how much it weighs; the prostate, which Kolya explains is a man’s secondary heart and without a doubt the more important one and one for which pumpkin oil is its best friend as the years pass…

  There was an un-Christmas-like minor key to Kolya’s voice: he had entered into his middle years, but had been almost nowhere, so what was the point of living, dammit, if he was going to die without having seen the bedouins of Africa or the aborigines of Australia. He had heard that a businessman in Russia had gotten rich just before he was shot and very nearly didn’t manage to see the world; but, having sensed something like this might happen, luckily he wrote the following in his will: ‘I want to travel, even after my death.’ He did so in a glass coffin, so the world would be clearly visible from both sides. His nearest and dearest, cursing him but carrying out his posthumous wishes, took him across Europe: he was transported to the Alps, lugged up the snaking roads through the fjords of Norway… Nicholas was deep in thought. He had on occasion seriously thought about such a possibility in the event that things didn’t work out while he was alive. Of course, he wouldn’t burden Lelka with such an obligation. She was not the kind of person who would lug him, dead, through fjords. It wasn’t clear if she would lug him around much longer alive. Besides, he was beginning to suspect her of infidelity. It was possible that it was even with Gerardito. But she wouldn’t lay her head down for Mecikas too…

  ‘So have you travelled a lot?’ he asks and the greenness of his eyes moistens. At the very bottom of the greenness there is an emerald that could have crystallised, you hazard a timid guess, either from a mixture of faith, hope and love for a dear one, or equally as likely could well have crystallised from stupidity.

  ‘Almost around the whole world. Kolya, tell me, do you really think that when you’re travelling you’re escaping? You can’t escape yourself anywhere, not in Norway or by dyeing your eyebrows…’

  ‘The whole world…’ Kolya answers with an echo from the fjords.

  We fall silent for a moment. Each of us with our own burden, each with our own Sisyphean task. And suddenly panic overtakes me, thinking that this silence might linger too long. Just a little longer and Kolya will leave because he is already bored with me. Because having fired off all of my merry gunpowder – the hats and black leather gloves, little saws and chisels – I have nothing else of interest for a person that would make his blood course through his veins. And when Kolya leaves… When he reaches that critical distance away from my home…

  I read somewhere that Russians, when talking about the phenomenon of the ‘modern Russian’ (which no one, not even they themselves, are able to explain), sometimes call themselves wet matches – hard to light and quick to go out. But Kolya… all of my senses, which were on standby, are now signalling – no, they’re not signalling, bells are going off, my heart is beating – that this is the one who you’d manage to light a cigarette with. And you’d light it up on the first try, even in a northerly wind. It doesn’t matter that, when trying to talk you out of sticking your head into a cement mixer, he doesn’t offer up the arguments for ‘the positive side’. What for? You yourself are an argument. Besides, the real argument is about wearing socks that are the colour of a presidium’s tablecloth. In the end – and this is most important – it is the argument that will survive a catastrophic tsunami hanging on to a python and, look, he’ll reach back and pull someone along and drag them by the hair, and why not, Goddamit, if they were just lying around uselessly on the way. Just listen to him, go with him…

  ‘But we don’t even need to knock on any more doors,’ Kolya says, calm again and lit up by an inner serenity (or maybe it’s the emerald?). ‘If we can’t go out into the world, that world, Kostas, will move in with us, right into our room or even into our palm, just take it and use it…’

  And sure enough, when the television screen scatters its snowflakes across the room, after a long pause the world once again comes into your home. What happened in it while you were sticking your head in a noose?

  On Channel 1 there’s a report about Christmas around the globe. Dire news from Naples – the church nativity tableaux were stolen. It appears, you see, that the white dust of Jerusalem’s roads kicked up in clouds of dust while cows, sheep and donkeys were herded off in groups. St. Josephs, Virgin Marys, shepherds and wise men were taken away – whole episodes of the memory of God – all drastically purged. But the most worrying, at least for Kolya and I, is the sky emptied by the thieves who carted off its wind-shaped arches, took down and extinguished the moon, the sun and the stars, and left all of us under the wide-open holes of the cosmos, each and every one of us the most orphaned of orphans… Still, and this is the real Christmas miracle: baby Jesus was not touched in any of those nativity tableaux…

  ‘Thinking logically,’ Kolya wrinkles his brow severely: ‘Can Jesus be stolen? Casper, Balthazar, Melchior, even St. Joseph, sure, but even then, clearly, only if you’re in a really tough spot, but Jesus?! In the end what can you do with him, stolen? Sell him? Keep him hidden in a shed and use him for your own purposes? Continuously make demands and more demands? Export him as contraband along with Saint George cigarettes? No, no,’ he shakes his head with his eyes closed, and suddenly he hits the
top of his head on the wall, ‘we all know that cursed state of mind when the burden of logic sits on you with all its force, and you can’t run or scream…’

  On Channel 2 there are orphanages and old people’s homes. There is the tear of an inebriated old man in close-up in one of the latter. He found himself there, in the ‘Grey-Haired Club’, after he signed over his flat to a nurse who used to massage his back but also ‘tenderly grabbed my buttocks’… We see a family with twelve children – ‘the backbone on which today’s Lithuania relies, despite the governmental controls, despite the stolen millions’ – sitting at the Christmas table on which all the plates – including the soup bowls, the appetiser trays, the platters usually filled with herring – are full of apples. Apples, everywhere there are only the apples that they grew and which, from the time they are small until the time they are grown, they chew with great perseverance. Maybe for that reason they have such strong backbones. But their teeth – when the camera zooms in, Kolya manages to get a look – they’re made of steel…

  On Channel 3 the wife of the Belarusian sausage king is singing. We both assess the vocal material sceptically, and even decide that she, most likely, doesn’t have a voice at all but only impressive silicon. Nicholas doesn’t like it when silicon squeaks between his hands. It squeaks, beg your pardon, like cheap potato starch. ‘You’ve tried it?’ I ask him. Many times! He’s too lazy to talk about it. He’s allergic to it – as soon as he touches silicon he immediately develops a rash. And boy do they explode in the crematorium when they’re put inside. He’s heard it himself…

  But on Channel 4 it’s all serious – tragic numbers, how many people went gaga this year and chose the unfortunate fate of wandering among the trees and the bushes until their appointed time on the earth passes. ‘Lithuania is once again among the leaders,’ a psychologist walks around the studio with a piece of unpolished green amber hanging on her chest and stops next to a window frame, which to her clearly symbolises the link between this world and the next. ‘In Europe, we are like a zoo… We have crossed all boundaries… the consequences of the Soviet era… Unfortunately, from all this the press and journalists only titillate us with sensationalism…’ After her factual analysis, a lyrical interlude ensues: the narrator’s voice, imbued with a worried metaphysical tone, is accompanied by images: clouds, pine needles and pine cones, a shoe rinsed out by snow and rain nestles in a bed of moss, the remains of a shirt, the end of a rope swinging romantically in the wind, and a line runs by underneath: ‘Christmas sale with manufacturer’s prices…’ Nicholas turns his head toward the television: ‘All the same, it’s good that you’re here, and not dead among those pine branches. Right, Kostas?’

  And in that moment you feel how, little by little, this and that is weaving together in your home – mostly from the absurd and the grotesque, somewhat less from mercy, and even less from sympathy. Who? And then the slow sensation – is it you? Or is it someone else for you? A moment later, is there SOMEONE at all? Regardless of what it is, that textile is abrasive, ‘stinging’, because Kolya is working on it, weaving it, and before weaving it, he readied the threads in his own unique way, and when trying to wrap and warm yourself in it, you might be bloodied if at that time you’ve shed your skin and thrown it on the back of the chair, or someone else has flayed it off. However, God sees – late on Christmas Eve we really are something or other…

  Translated by Jayde Will from Danute Kalinauskaite, Niekada nezinai, Vilnius: Baltos lankos (2008).

  Danute Kalinauskaite (born 1959) studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University. Her first short-story collection, published in 1987, made her overnight success and marked her as one of the most important authors of her generation. However she shunned the limelight and it was only in 2008 that she published her second short-story collection, You Never Know (Niekada nezinai, 2008), which won the Lithuanian Writers’ Union Prize.

  * * *

  1 A sweet, crouton-shaped biscuit traditionally eaten during the Christmas season.

  Published in co-operation with The International Cultural Programme Centre programme: “Books from Lithuania” and Arts Council England, London.

  Copyright

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

  24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

  email: info@dedalusbooks.com

  www.dedalusbooks.com

  ISBN printed book 978 1 909232 42 6

  ISBN ebook 978 1 909232 90 7

  Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors,

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  Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd. 58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080

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  Publishing History

  First published by Dedalus in 2013

  First ebook edition in 2013

  Introduction, Notes and Selection © Almantas Samalavicius 2013

  Translation copyrights are given at the end of each text.

  Texts which are in copyright are copyright their individual authors.

  The right of Almantas Samalavicius to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Printed in Finland by Bookwell

  Typeset by Marie Lane

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.